It’s just trying out stuff. Like drawing somebody waiting for the bus, something that you would ordinarily spend one panel on, to drag that out to three pages. It could even have been longer, I think. I guess I learned something from it. Not having something new happen in every panel or changing the camera angle for no reason, to dare to be boring. I Killed Adolf Hitler is the album where I played around with that the most, especially the second half where they just stand around, waiting. Also, using conversation that doesn’t really mean anything, just everyday chatter that is not about the plot, that doesn’t move the story forward. Often that stuff is what you can relate to. Like in Stranger than Paradise where John Lurie is telling a joke but then can’t remember the punch line, or the scene where they’re at the movies, which goes on forever. It’s truer to life than Tom Cruise cutting the blue wire of the bomb three seconds before it blows up.

Conditions were cramped at Marvel in the early days. Stan Lee had an office. His secretary, Flo Steinberg, Sol Brodsky, Marie Severin and later Roy Thomas had desks, and that was it. Everyone else was freelance, and only came in once in a while. Sinnott recalled that in the early days, he would go in on Fridays to drop off artwork, and Lee would always talk him into doing corrections or other work.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that the last few years have seen an impressive flowering of graphic novels and comic book art. These days, every self-respecting, well-read person should have a graphic novel or two on the shelf — and that makes this the perfect moment to give your fave loved one a comic as a holiday gift. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how about a present with both?

You hear that? Non-comics awareness is now suitable only for rock dwellers.

The “Blame DC” model tends to work in the “If you build it, they will come” model. However, DC built Blue Beetle. They made it easy to get into and it tied into a few of their big events (Infinite Crisis, Sinestro Corps, and Countdown). It was fun and funny. They did their job. Why didn’t it work out and go on for 800 issues? (My question is ‘why should it?’ but that’s another post entirely.)

“Who are the Dark Avengers? That’s the question that all of Marveldom is going to be asking as Secret Invasion gives way to Dark Reign. Are they clones? Doppelgangers? Future Echoes? Or something more immediate and horrifying? And once their identity is revealed, that will only propel the Marvel Universe onto a path that will carry it forward towards an inevitable, explosive climax.”

“We came up with this pretty good idea for a movie, and then of course what happened was we got in the middle of a ‘South Park’ run, and were completely out of ideas,” Parker recalls. “And we were like, well, we’ve got to use the movie idea. And that became ‘Imaginationland.'”

“Imaginationland” was, of course, the three-part story in October 2007 about a group of terrorists plotting to bomb a fictional world, where all man-made, mythical characters live — including Super Mario, Luke Skywalker and Strawberry Shortcake. The story arc, now available on DVD, yeilded an Emmy for outstanding animated program for one hour or more.

The story mentions once again how hard TEAM AMERICA was to make, and why the South Park duo of Parker and Matt Stone will probably never make another movie.

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“Who are the Dark Avengers? That’s the question that all of Marveldom is going to be asking as Secret Invasion gives way to Dark Reign. Are they clones? Doppelgangers? Future Echoes? Or something more immediate and horrifying? …”

Abhay– not really an oxymoron. Beetle’s tie-ins tended to be both light on tie-in (“And read what happens next in Finite Crisis #6!”) and big on deft recaps (“As we join our story in progress, an evil space satellite is filled with killer robots! can Blue Beetle take them out in time?”). The Sinestro Corps tie-in was pretty much “Alien Invasion! In Texas!”

BB used the tie-ins to attract the die-hard fans of the crossovers, but in a way that didn’t alienate regular readers.

If it were a book like New Avengers or whatever, you’d have a point, though.